I wonder what she is reading. It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things. At least she is not…
The Complex Spaces of Psychological (and Cultural) Self-Deception
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over…
Escape Velocity: the Challenge of Introducing New Ideas
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."- John Maynard Keynes...and escaping the old ones is a monumental task when a bad idea, once entrenched, becomes the source of it's own self-propagating rationale and serves as a limiting filter on the percolation of new cognitive methods and new…
Cognitive Eugenics
A cognitive eugenics born of genetic testing (and selection) for intelligence is almost upon us. Except - intelligence is not only a matter of genetics. Environmental influences, opportunities, sociological feedback mechanisms, the creatively adaptive development of unique cognitive methods - these are all factors in human intelligence. Cognitive eugenics - let's call it what it…
Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity
I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic)…
On Reason and Intelligence in Mind and Machine
What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are…
Social Computation, Complexity and the Constructive Necessity of Dissonance
Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system…
Miracles, Magic and Advanced Technological Civilisations
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652. Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love. It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature. In a similar vein,…
Beauty and Impossibility
Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration…
Culture, Cognition, Meaning
Culture, like meaning, is not found in one single place but is distributed across the entire surface of our shared cognition and the proliferating multiplicity of artefact, image and a logic of sequential algorithm and rationalised procedure that informs our experience. The self-evident fact that we are unable to unambiguously or unproblematically define or agree…
Unattainable Me: An Art of Self-identity and Desire
The essential art in the formation of self-identity is the cultivation of an ideal object around which to sediment and concretise that self. Lacan identified a "Mirror Stage" in psychological development which concisely captures the cognitive and cultural arc of our shared experience. The catch (and cost) here: to maintain persistence, continuity and individuation, the…
Culture: Using Fiction to understand Fact
To understand the mood and the Zeitgeist of an era, inspect the art, the fiction, the entertainment and the overtly and consciously, intentionally superficial. It is in the manifestation and cultivation of oblique and useful falsehood that the underlying axioms inexorably reveal themselves. What is considered "real" or "important" reveals itself as merely being another…
